Early Collectors of Japanese Prints and The Metropolitan Museulm ...

of 522 Japanese ceramics in 1893. He had acquired
both the ceramics and prints the year before while
honeymooning in Japan with his third wife. An Englishman,
Captain Frank Brinkley (1841-1912), active
in Japan since the 186os first as a journalist, author,
and military adviser to the Japanese government,
and then as a dealer, had apparently sold the Smiths
a ready-made collection. In a letter of September 9,
1893, to the director of the Museum, Smith reported
on the state of the Japanese art market in a manner
that sounds all too familiar: "I have had a letter from
Brinkley a few days since in which he says that it would
be absolutely impossible to make such a collection
now."55 In 1896 Smith was pleased to have Fenollosa
spend an entire day with him looking over his Japa-
nese prints.
In their meeting of June 14, 1915, the trustees fi-
nally voted to establish a Department of Far Eastern
Art, and to appoint as its curator S. C. (Sigisbert
Chretien) Bosch Reitz, a native of Amsterdam and
descendant of an old and cultivated family of art lov-
ers (Figure 26).56 Bosch Reitz, trained as a painter in
the academic style, entered the Academie Julien in
Paris in 1884 (a year after Samuel Isham), and sub-
sequently exhibited in the Paris Salon, where he was
awarded a gold medal. In 1900 he went to Japan for
a year to study Japanese art, and this was clearly a
turning point in his life. While in Japan, Bosch Reitz
learned the technique of woodcutting under the tu-
telage of another European, the Austrian graphic artist
Emil Orlik (1870-1932), and one handsome example
of the Dutchman's work in this medium has survived
(Figure 27). (The paintings made there were all sto-
len a few days before he left Japan.57) In 1909 he be-
gan to devote his time to the study of Oriental ce-
ramics in European museums and in 1914 was offered
a cataloguing job at the Louvre. The outbreak of war
prevented his accepting that appointment, and he
found himself instead in New York, where he was ap-
proached by the Metropolitan Museum. Although this
was his first museum position, he quickly initiated a
program of exhibitions of Chinese and Japanese art,
and until his retirement in 1927 (when he returned
to Holland and resumed painting), he was remark-
ably active in the pursuit of prints. He bought heavily
at auction, taking advantage of the availability of great
collections that were being dispersed by the first gen-
eration of collectors.
Arnold Genthe, an American high-society photog-
28. Arnold Genthe (1869-1942), Self-Portrait. Photo-
graph. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of
Clarence McK. Lewis, 54.549.35
rapher of German descent who spent much of his life
in New York (Figure 28), was another artist who be-
gan collecting ukiyo-e around the turn of the cen-
tury. He credited Fenollosa with sparking his interest
in prints and eventually owned some two thousand
examples.58 Genthe devoted a chapter of his mem-
oirs to Japan, where he traveled for six months in
1908. He was a serious and sensitive visitor, who took
the trouble to learn some colloquial Japanese and
55. Letter in the MMA Archives.
56. Edward Robinson, "Department of Far Eastern Art,"
MMAB io, no. 7 (July 1915) pp. 135-136.
57. K. G. Boon, "A Dutch Artist in Japan," in H. M. Kaempfer
and Jhr. W. O. G. Sickinghe, eds., The Fascinating World of the
Japanese Artist (The Hague, 1971) p. 48; see notes compiled by
Peter Six, MMA Archives. Miss H.M.A.F. Six also provided in-
formation on Bosch Reitz's family history.
58. Arnold Genthe, As I Remember
(New York, 1936) p. 145.
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